This year I decided to keep my birthday low-key.

Oh sure, it would have been fun to throw yet another orgiastic, decadent, cocaine-fuelled party that would have put Studio 54 in its heyday to shame. But at some point, you have to look back on the trail of broken hearts, the trashed hotel room suites, the days-long drug-induced blackouts, and the five illegitimate children scattered around the Western hemisphere (with a sixth on the way) and say damnit, enough is enough!

So low-key it was. I even tried to discourage gifts. “I’m only accepting socks this year,” I said. I thought that was pretty clever, but I failed to scare off Shauna, who went right out and got me some really nice socks. They’re black, non-dressy, and very comfortable — neither scratchy nor sweat-inducing. And of course, my teenaged sister Sarah rebelled immediately. “You sound just like Dad!” she said, exasperated. Sarah got me six wine glasses, which is excellent, because now I don’t have to serve wine to my guests in coffee mugs. The House of Goer is class all the way, baby! Finally, Mom got me Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Websites. I’ve already read most of it, and let me tell you, it is a fabulous book, probably up there with Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy’s opus. Maybe better.

I like Clark’s book for two reasons. First, he is pleasantly direct:

If you use the HTML Tidy authoring tool-cum-validator from the W3C, you’ll be stuck with error messages for every layout table you write that lacks a summary attribute, whose majesty will be fully revealed in mere moments. If that happens to you, adding summary="" to your table is legal and will shut the validator up.

Second, there are numerous myths in the web design community regarding web accessibility, and Clark wastes no time in puncturing them. For example, it seems that the difference between Clark and those who blithely advise that “table-based layouts are useless for blind people using screen readers,” is that Clark actually seems to have tried using screen readers. (And surprise! they handle most table-based layouts just fine.)

Of course that particular myth never made much sense anyway. After all, it’s almost impossible to find a major commercial site that doesn’t use table-based layouts. So what kind of silly software company would try selling a “voice browser” that chokes on nearly every single commercial site on the web? I think the reason this myth is so popular is because of its “clubbability”. If you’re having an argument with someone over whether to use a CSS-based layout over a table-based layout, the screen reader myth is great for clubbing your opponent over the head. “Your table-based layout will make it impossible for those poor, poor blind people to read your website! You must hate blind people! Jerk!”

As Grandma Harman used to say, “whether you’re wrong or right, it’s always useful to hold the moral high ground.” Well, okay, actually she said, “Never draw to an inside straight” — advice I have foolishly ignored for years.

While I was hanging out at Dave’s, trying to figure out what was going on with Sarah’s computer, I saw Earth and Beyond in action. Pat and Dave are big fans of this game. Earth and Beyond is similar to EQ… except you don’t have to spend all your time killing stuff, it’s not very crowded, and the graphics are far, far better. Yikes! It took me about six months to break my EQ habit, and this game looks even more dangerous. Fortunately, as the FAQ makes quite clear:

Q: Will there be a Linux or Macintosh version?
A: No.

So it looks like I’m safe for now.¹ Although poor Pat sure was disappointed that I didn’t rush right out to buy or construct a PC just for that particular game. “Well, I think I’ll call Elana,” he said. “If you cannot be turned to the Dark Side, then perhaps she will.”

NEVER!

Anyway. So late last night I decided to brush up on RSS. No, check that — late last night I decided to figure out what RSS is in the first place. All I knew was that Moveable Type automatically generates these strange index.xml and index.rdf files, and damned if I knew what either file was about. Sad but true.

So first I found a description of RSS 1.0. Hmmm, okay, interesting. Then I skimmed a few pages on RDF. All right, I think I’m sorta getting it. Then I ran into RSS 0.92, which looks pretty different. And then I found people talking about RSS 2.0. And it seemed like all of these versions were being promoted and used. Eh? What’s going on?

A few more Google searches later, and all became clear. Turns out there’s a
holy
war
going
on. Oh, swell. By the time I finished slogging through all the flames, proclamations, and hurt feelings, it was past midnight. I suppose the one good thing about my brief foray into the wonderful, wacky world of RSS was that it happened to end with Aaron Swartz’s brilliant response to the whole mess. Wow. Maybe he really is a boy genius.

1. Of course what with the impending release for the Mac of Neverwinter Nights, Master of Orion III, and Freedom Force, my “safety” is somewhat up in the air these days.

So I’ve been surfing around the web, looking at other journals and weblogs,
trying to see what other people are doing for their design and content
management. It’s been educational, to say the least.

The good news is that I’ve discovered my journaling software Sugar Daddy:
Moveable Type 2.0.
First, I looked into
Blogger,
but Blogger is centrally managed, and its server has been hacked and attacked too many times for
my comfort. There was Radio,
but it costs $40, and said $40 would go directly to
Dave Winer — yuck. I took a look at
blosxom,
which was awfully cute (“only 60 lines of code!”)… but no.

Finally, there was Greymatter,
which was very, very close. Noah Grey deserves a lot of credit for putting this
tool together by himself — and spawning a host of imitators. Unfortunately,
Noah is no longer supporting Greymatter. Also, Greymatter didn’t integrate well
with my old journal archive, and it wouldn’t let me have a different essay for
each monthly archive page (not without playing a little trick or two).

Anyway, it looks like Moveable Type’s got it all and then some. Fast, even more
flexible than Greymatter, and with a stellar web-based user interface. I will never
bad-mouth Perl again. (Not that I’ve ever
bad-mouthed Perl, but from now on if I hear anyone bad-mouth Perl, I’ll
at least know to smirk knowingly, the same way I do when I hear about 32-CPU Intel
systems.)

My other discovery was that the Web designer community is rife with
snobbery
and breathless enthusiasm for bleeding-edge-technology-uber-alles. (And the
Pope is Catholic, water is wet, … yeah, yeah.)
Still, you’d think there would be some maturation over the years.

A couple of years ago, websites were festooned with
buttons that said, “This site best viewed in Netscape/IE 4.” Now things are
worse — a depressingly high number of sites use JavaScript to judge whether
your browser is worthy, and if you fall short, you get a message
ordering you to upgrade to a browser that “supports web standards.” A few people don’t
even bother with the obnoxious little message: they actually
kick you out of their site if you don’t make the cut. Apparently
these people think they are part of
some kind of movement.

Let’s leave aside the fact that no browser fully supports web standards
(HTML4.01 and CSS2) and focus on why someone might not have the latest,
greatest browser:

• Their boss says so. Once a company standardizes its intranet on one
  browser, that’s it. Everyone’s stuck with the same software, and might be for
  years, end of story.

• They don’t have the hardware. The latest browsers don’t run so hot on old
  386 computers. This is a particular problem for libraries, schools, and foreigners (but
  who gives a crap about them?)

• They have no idea what you’re talking about. Your average user could
  not possibly care less what browser they use. They might not even know
  what “HTML” is. And no, these people are not beneath contempt — they
  just don’t care about the same weird, esoteric things that you do.

  Quick, web-boy — under which
  simple physical principle does a standard flush toilet operate? No? You don’t know?
  But you use one every day!

• They aren’t going to download 20MB over dial-up just to see your webpage.

• They might be savvier than you think. Most of the really
  cool kids surf around with javascript, Flash, and images turned off. And they
  are not impressed with your bleating about how people don’t upgrade fast enough.

But honestly, what the heck do I know? I still use a table-based layout. And my pages
only validate HTML 4.01 Transitional.
How sad is that?

Edit, April 2003: Now this site is all CSS-P based and validates HTML 4.01 Strict. Although I should point out that I used <i> tags to make this addendum. Take that, standards-weenies.

The website repair job continues… mostly because
CuteFTP is the only
piece of software I have right now that’s working reliably. It’s much more fun than Diablo II
anyway. Really.

Anyway, for kicks I ran my site through the W3C Validator.
Ugh, how humiliating. Unknown character encoding! Unquoted attribute percentage signs!
Oh, the horror…

Well, I fixed the little nitpicky things. But I’m afraid I had to settle for
validating HTML 4.01 Transitional rather than HTML 4.01 Strict. I mean, to validate Strict, you
have to give up all those deprecated tags, like BGCOLOR, in favor of cascading stylesheets.
Ack!

Now, the W3C folks aren’t so bad. It’s their job to be pedantic. But if you look hard
enough, you can find self-righteous
articles that blather on about how all the hip people these days would never even
touch the <BIG> tag, let alone the <FONT> tag.
Hmmmm… if I just want to turn one thing on the page red and bold, how exactly does:

<SPAN STYLE=”color: red; font-weight: bold”>…</SPAN>

save you more trouble than

<B><FONT COLOR=”RED”>…</FONT></B> ?

Sure, stylesheets allow you to create and reuse classes. That’s great… but sometimes
you just want one simple in-line change. In that case, what exactly is the clunky stylesheet
syntax buying you?

Oh well. Someday, everyone will use Amaya, CSS3 will
spread throughout the land, and ne’er a Tripod homepage will be seen.

But until then, you can take away my BGCOLOR when you can pry
it out of my cold, dead fingers.

Edit, May 2003: Well, this post is embarrassingly dated. Just for the record, I still think that A) BGCOLOR has its uses and B) the “Font of Foulness” article is extremely silly.